TV: Online video without the monthly fees

Goodfriend: Streaming network broadcasts

Free streaming services are television’s next big frontier, said Jared Newman in Fast Company. As viewers abandon cable, and subscription services like Netflix and Hulu jostle for market share, smaller companies are rising up to offer free shows and movies supported by advertising. Among the top offerings: five-year-old Tubi, which quadrupled its reported viewership last year, and Pluto TV, which includes Bloomberg TV and NASA’s official channel. Last month Amazon, which already has a video service for Prime members, launched the free streaming channel Freedive, with movies and TV shows such as The Bachelor and Heroes. With subscription services increasingly focused on big-ticket shows, there’s an opening for services offering the reruns, older movies, and niche content viewers might have caught while trawling basic cable. The most popular programming on Tubi, which will spend more than $100 million on licensing this year, includes reality TV, horror films, and kids’ shows that “may bring in more eyeballs than critical acclaim.”

They may not offer “the latest and greatest,” but “there are lots of services worth checking out,” said David Pierce in The Wall Street Journal. “And yes, they’re completely free, as long as you don’t mind watching a few ads.” There are services covering “virtually every interest and genre”—Snagfilms for documentaries, Crunchyroll for anime, Stirr for local news. Tubi, with an enormous and wide-ranging library, is “the closest a free service can come to being Netflix.” Sony’s Crackle is “heavy on the fast-paced drama and high-stakes epics.” Ultimately, as streaming services proliferate and consumers tire of adding “yet another $10-a-month subscription” to their monthly bills, “our streaming life will include a mix of ad-supported and subscription-based services.”

One new entrant into the free-streaming landscape, Locast, is “perhaps the most audacious media experiment in years,” said Edmund Lee in The New York Times. Founded by former media executive David Goodfriend, the service uses an antenna to access content from the major networks, which is “piped through the internet and assembled into an app.” Subscribers to Locast, which currently operates in a handful of cities, can watch it “in pristine quality” on almost any device. The technology is similar to the startup Aereo, which was sued out of existence by NBC, CBS, ABC, and Fox. The twist is that Locast is a nonprofit; Goodfriend, who spent time at the Federal Communications Commission, believes that lets him legally retransmit over-the-air broadcasts. So far the networks have avoided tangling with Locast, but if it grows bigger, expect litigation, since Goodfriend’s end run around licensing fees makes his fledgling company “a threat to the entire TV-industrial complex.”